Giants Exhibition - National Museum Edinburgh
Usually dinosaurs are what spring to mind when you think about prehistoric animals - but the exhibition 'Giants' highlights a completely different selection of huge animals. Available to see at the National Museum for Scotland until September, it is a large scale exhibition allowing us to learn about animals we will perhaps already be familiar with - woolly mammoths, the saber-toothed cat, and the megalodon shark. It also features huge sculptures of animals I had never heard of before - including a giant ape, an enormous snake (Titanoboa), and a cross between a rhino and a giraffe (Paraceratherium). This exhibition would be very appealing to children, especially to those who love dinosaurs - but it is also very enjoyable as an adult.
The exhibition does a great job of presenting a range of pieces - parts of real skeletons and teeth, or items created through casts or 3D printing - as part of these impressive, life size sculptures. The sculptures are very dramatic, and emphasise the size and scale of these animals. As part of the form of each sculpture, information is presented in a range of formats: through artwork and written panels; films of experts like palaeontologists; and through games. Each species also has ‘footage’ of how it would have looked in its environment, which is incredibly life-like. These films are very effective at giving an insight into the animals' habitat, landscape and scale.
As someone who is fascinated by evolution, the exhibition is excellent at presenting this topic in a very clear way. They explain how these giant species came to develop as a result of the intersection of climate, food available and the other animals within their habitat at that point in time (both as prey or predators). The cold blooded 15 metre long snake Titanoboa grew to a huge size, as the climate was hotter. Cold-blooded animals warm with their surroundings - and as their internal temperature rises, they can grow faster, particularly as in a warmer climate, there was plentiful food. Ultimately though, many of these larger animals died out. Their size is costly as they have longer pregnancies, fewer babies, and their offspring take longer to mature. Smaller mammals reproduce much faster, and can recover faster if there is a significant event in their environment - and this is why they are more numerous to this day.
This exhibition would have been enriched if they had linked it to other exhibits in the existing collections at the National Museum. Within the three floors of the amazing natural history section, you can see a skeleton of a giant sloth, a sabre-toothed cat and a giant deer, all of which also feature in the Giants exhibition. It would have been a great opportunity to use the Giants exhibition (which was developed in Belgium and is a touring exhibition) as a springboard for visitors to the National Museum to seek other parts of the permanent collections. I recommend the Giants exhibition - but once you have seen it, go ahead and see the giant sloth, sabre-toothed cat and giant deer up close in the permanent collections!
